New York, I Love You

Big Gay Ice Cream is a real place. I snapped this as I walked past it late yesterday morning on my way back to Doma na rohu, the (wonderful) Mitteleuropa neighborhood restaurant where I ate with friends on Thursday night. (The roast suckling pig was great, but the stuffed cabbage rolls were transporting; good red Austrian wine, too.) I left my credit card there, and ran back downtown to retrieve it.

Anyway, it was waaaaaay too cold to eat ice cream, but now that I’ve seen their ice cream menu, I wish I had gone in anyway and ordered either a Cococone or a Bea Arthur.

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25 Responses to New York, I Love You

Interesting that you’d consider supporting such a place. Not that you’d boycott gay-owned businesses, but it would seem that the name of the place is just the sort of “normalizing,” in your face activism that cultural conservatives rail against. It’s one thing to refuse to disown a gay child. That’s the “hard work” of cultural policing.

This is the easy work. The gimme. The one-foot putt. If someone of your cultural bent and credential can have a chuckle and judge the ice-cream on its merits… This battle is far more over than I ever imagined.

For the record, I’d eat there without hesitation. I bet it’s good ice cream.

The ‘Bea Arthur’ is pretty funny, but I think Sam M is exactly correct. No reason to give this place your custom. There are probably 20 Mom and Pop gelato places run by 3rd gen Italians who don’t mistake exits for entrances.

Being a New Yorker and a Conservative puts you at an interesting position.

As Sam M says:
” it would seem that the name of the place is just the sort of “normalizing,” in your face activism that cultural conservatives rail against.”

But as a New Yorker, I see it as one of the authentic signs of community and sense of place we share. To get rid of this sort of thing would be to homogenize it into a bland “all Americanism” that’s destructive to Authentic American culture.

There is maybe one city on the Eastern Seaboard (and really, only one borough of that city) where this kind of thing is normalized , and given a bit of humor. What conservative can’t enjoy the fact that you can tell by the ice cream shop what city you’re in?

Back when they were the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck, these guys appeared in an all-time classic New York Times article about the culture clash in the New York food truck scene after the big economic downturn. Apparently a bunch of white-collar yuppies decided to open their own food trucks when they lost their old jobs, and this massive influx of college graduates into the food-truck market was not popular with the immigrant street vendors who’ve been running the New York food-truck scene for years.

Sample quote: “The Big Gay Ice Cream Truck is driven by Doug Quint, a doctoral candidate in bassoon performance at CUNY. ‘The whole Brooklyn Philharmonic season was canceled,’ he said. ‘I have to get through the summer somehow.’”

You can imagine how a long-time kebab vendor from Egypt would react to a statement like that, especially if the BGICT had just invaded his turf.

I’m with M_Young. In the old Italian neighborhoods you’d see bakeries that sold “bakery ices”, which are not the standard “Italian ices” sold on the streets in Manhattan (good as those are on a hot summer day). If there are any bakery ices left at all, they’re a lot more unusual than “gay ice cream”, or randomly mixed, cutely named flavors. For a heterosexual in New York (a city that is overtly hostile to “breeders”), patronizing a gay ice cream store is sort of like going out of your way to patronize a gangsta ice cream parlor in Baton Rouge the day after the mall riot.

Also (MMCCANN take note), most of the gay-branded stuff is strictly for tourists–those stores make a high-double-digit chunk of their income during Gay Pride Week.

For that matter, most of the street-level stuff in Manhattan, and pretty much all of it between 14th Street and Canal Street, is strictly for tourists. It’s been that way for several generations, and downtown has been virtually a theme park since the ’90s. If Disneyland rented apartments, it too would have permanent residents.

Hip New York cheesemongers pen product pitches that leave the wine trade standing. Here’s the Bedford Cheese Shop on an Italian ewe’s cheese: “The Lindsay Lohan of the cheese world, this pecorino has a tan, leathery exterior that surrounds a delicate yellow paste. With hints of herbs and the aroma of hay, you can almost hear the bleating”

I guess M_Young and Rambler 88 don’t think there can be anything like a gay conservative. Well.

Now, Sister Elizabeth would be fun to be with, I’m sure. Does she still venerate the priests, bishops, archbishops and cardinals (and the Pope) who were so complicit worldwide in their abuse of adolescents?

Yep, gay ice cream is the end of civilization as we know it.

I’m so happy to know there is a gay deathstyle, that compares favorably with New York’s muggings and rapes.

Methinks the good Sister doth complain too much.

I wonder if she even knows a “homosexual” in real life.

Sad, sad, sad.

[Note from Rod: If gay people make delicious ice cream, I'll so be there to buy it and gobble it down. We must not let cultural politics come between ourselves and good food. -- RD]

“If gay people make delicious ice cream, I’ll so be there to buy it and gobble it down. We must not let cultural politics come between ourselves and good food.”

This is very much in line with what I mentioned above; I wouldn’t think that you’d be interested at all in boycotting a gay-owned business. A hard-core culture warrior might quibble about surrendering just for the sake of aesthetics. Isn’t that the complaint cultural conservatives make against sexual libertinism all the time? They know gay people prefer sex with people who have the same plumbing… but sometimes you can;t always get what you want. Limits! Etc.

Feh. I’m proboably more of a libertine than a cultural conservative. I only point it out because I believe a lot of us are consistently surprised by Rod’s eclecticism. The hardcore trad who has positive things to say about the local drag queen, a sex-doll lawn ornament and a gay ice-cream shop.

At then end of the day, I think this points back to the Southern thing. A while back, when discussing the South, Rod pointed to the way Southerners are quite comfortable with inconsistency, that it’s part of the recipe. That it’s one of the things that frustrates any attempt at an outside critique.

The name of the business could be a pun on the pre-1965 meaning of “gay.” Look in the society and women’s pages, clubs were always having “gay” affairs, even the members were described as “gay.” About ten years ago, I was doing some summer tutoring with the children of a couple of friends, and one girl was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond. When the text described an ardent young man admiring the “gay figure” of a young lady recently arrived in town, she asked “What does THAT mean?” Well, when the book was written, it was a word for something a man might admire in a woman…